Deviant or Normal? Assessing Anomalies in Middle Stone Age Small Prey Exploitation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Studies of forager economies in southern Africa have documented changes in subsistence strategies between the Middle and Later Stone Age. As evidenced by the disproportionate frequencies of faunal remains from large, gregarious grazers, the prevailing interpretation has been that MSA foragers hunted more large than small game in comparison to LSA foragers. Moreover, when small prey is in relative abundance at MSA sites, these faunas are dominated by slow or sessile organisms, whereas LSA sites typically feature faster moving/more difficult to capture prey. However, over the last decade deviations in the "typical" MSA small prey utilization pattern have emerged. Among these is the documentation of habitual utilization of difficult to capture small prey from MSA contexts at Die Kelders Cave 1. Are these deviations simply anomalies to be expected when considering human behavioral variability over time and space? Or do these represent a challenge to an optimal foraging perspective, particularly when non-nutritional benefits are considered? Does a human behavioral ecology framework allow for more nuanced application when resource utilization deviates from traditional prey choice model predictions?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25287